Brooks' Message Lost In Medium

RECORD REVIEWS

December 28, 1994|J.D. CONSIDINE The Baltimore Sun

GARTH BROOKS: The Hits (Liberty)

Considering the kind of success Garth Brooks has enjoyed during the past five years, it would stand to reason that any collection of his best work would say at least something about his cultural impact or artistic vision. But the only clear message that comes through with The Hits is that Brooks knows how to sell records.

Instead of a coherent point of view, these singles offer a profoundly mixed message, what with the ultra-tolerant We Shall Be Free contrasted against the redneck gripes of American Honky-Tonk Bar Association, or the party-hearty heroine of Ain't Goin' Down (Til the Sun Comes Up) finding her opposite in the good-timin' wife flattened by her hubby in Papa Loved Mama. Moreover, Brooks never really conveys a clear musical identity, moving with a session man's lack of conscience from the cliched country of Rodeo and Friends in Low Places to the folkie introspection of What She's Doing Now and That Summer, and onto the pop ambition of The Thunder Rolls and Shameless.

Could it be that Brooks' success had less to do with what he had to say than with the fact that nobody else was saying it?

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69 BOYZ: Nineteen Ninety Quad (Rip-It)

Once Tag Team, 95 South and Duice proved that there was a national market for the Southern bass sound, it was inevitable that some band would reduce the whole thing to the lowest common denominator. But who would have thought that denominator would be as low or common as what turns up on the 69 Boyz' debut, Nineteen Ninety Quad? Although there's no denying the rhythmic urgency of call-and-response numbers like Tootsee Roll and Kitty-Kitty, it must also be admitted that, on an intellectual level, those songs have the depth of dew. Apart from a few wonderfully stupid liquor jokes, like Hennessy (a parody of Arrested Development's Tennessee), most of the album is given over to sex talk of the kind normally offered by third-graders - lots of allegedly naughty words, but little in the way of sense or wit. Worth owning only if you think My Ding-a-Ling really was Chuck Berry's greatest single.

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PORTISHEAD: Dummy (Go! Discs/London)

It's not hard to understand why Portishead is the darling of the English rock intelligentsia. Not only do the songs on Dummy draw from an incredibly hip range of sources, from hip-hop and trance to sampled jazz-fusion albums, but Portishead manages to mash it all down into precisely the sort of slow, drony muddle normally associated with guitar bands. Granted, that tends to make for better pop theory than it does pop music, particularly since Portishead's intentionally muffled textures make each song indistinguishable from the next. But there's enough life in Beth Gibbons' tart, haunted voice to keep the experience from becoming completely soporific.